#9: 🐍 2025 in review 🐍

Snakes shed their skin many times throughout their lifetimes as part of their growth cycle, but this snake called GMC sure has learnt how to shake it off with flair. It's not always easy to stay true to your principles and values while navigating an increasingly challenging future, and sometimes the only way is to reinvent yourself as many times as necessary.

Our advice? Build bridges, form alliances, collaborate with each other, cross-pollinate, join forces, resist together. Collective struggle is the best remedy against loneliness, isolation and individualism. Put your passion in the service of creative resistance!

With that in mind, here are some of the highlights of the year from our little virtual office:

January

• We had a much-needed and long-yearned-for in-person retreat in Burgos. It featured plenty of new-year resolutions, some monastic field trips, quality bonding time and a fair deal of cosy indoor chilling.
• We launched the Translators Against the Machine open call for articles and testimonies from translators and other textual workers whose careers have been impacted by the unfettered advance of the AI boom/bubble. As of today, it's still open (and probably will be for a while longer), so if you want to contribute, send us your pitch!
• Following the horrifying October 2024 floods in Valencia, we translated this piece by Elena Krause that focuses on the human side of the disaster. We would also like to mention REMOBLAR post Dana, the project of our dear collaborator Mireia and her wonderful Valencia-based collective MAKEA to involve schools in a process of collective reconstruction, reflection and learning from the emergency and the crisis.
  
  February
• We sent out the first issue of this newsletter!
• We had the honour of creating Spanish subtitles for a fascinating documentary called "Nous sommes des champs de bataille", by Mathieu Rigouste. It exposes the inner workings of police control, the arms industry and the war machine, reflects on the role of citizenship in the system of violence and exhibits the power of friendship and self-organised resistance🔥. It was self-produced and self-distributed. You can watch it here by donating whatever amount you want.
• We translated and published a Lovework piece in Spanish, "La nueva economía alimentaria colonialista" by Alexander Zaitchik. You can also read the original article in English here.
  
  March
• We published the first testimony of the Translation against the Machine series, a very relatable article by Laura Vuillemin called "Good Agency Gone Bad".
• We researched, interviewed and wrote two study cases for the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL). We chose Inka Moss, a company that exports sphagnum moss while providing livelihood and support to the local communities that harvest the moss, and Manos del Uruguay, a network of 12 rural, female-led workers’ cooperatives that produces sustainable luxury wool yarns and clothing for domestic and export sale.
  
  April
• We wrote the 2024 annual report for Social Economy Europe, an organisation that pushes to advance the agenda of social economy in the EU (hence the name), and has been doing so since 2000. You can read the report here.
• We translated Dan McQuillan's "Resistencia ante la IA en pos de una transición justa" into Spanish as lovework. You can read the original article in English here.
  
  May
• We published the second Translators Against the Machine article, "Autism and the freelance translation grind" by Renata Fernandes.
  
  July
• We got to bring our care-oriented governance model to the 11th European Society for Translation Studies Congress at the University of Leeds! The session was called "Resisting Precarity: An Innovative Business and Governance Model for Language Workers". You can watch the presentation and read all about it here! Big thanks once again to Gökhan Fırat for making this happen.
  
  September
• The third testimony for Translators against the Machine saw the light: Thalia Sutton's "Proofreading Is Not “Quality Control”: How Manga Language Professionals Became Exploited Data Workers".
• We attended the amazing conference by Milagros Miceli "Who is really fueling your AI?", in collaboration with SUPERRRLab, The Data Workers’ Inquiry, and the Weizenbaum Institute. You can watch it here!
  
  October
• We edited the second edition of "Agroecology in Action: Stories from the Ground", a very inspiring publication that reminds us that agroecology is a movement of connection: between people and land, between knowledge and action, and between local realities and global transformation.
• We translated website materials for Political Watch, a Spanish organisation that spearheads various initiatives to strengthen democracy.
  
  November
• We were very excited to publish the fourth story of the Translators against the Machine initiative, "There will be a Happy Ending" by Julian Pintat, who foresees a collapse in support for AI products in the translation industry. There might be still some hope, after all.
  
  December
• We translated an article on COP30 for the Brussels office of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. You can read it here (and the original Spanish here).
  
  

Thank you all for supporting us and for staying resilient in times like these.
See you in 2026!